According to a summary of the bill released by the Patriotic Millionaires—an advocacy group that helped craft the measure—the wealth tax would have four brackets:
- 2% for all wealth between 1,000 and 10,000 times median household wealth;
- 4% for all wealth between 10,000 and 100,000 times median household wealth;
- 6% for all wealth between 100,000 and 1,000,000 times median household wealth; and
- 8% for all wealth over 1,000,000 times median household wealth;
"In the unlikely event median household wealth fell below $50,000 from its current level of about $120,000, the thresholds would be fixed at $50 million, $500 million, $5 billion, and $50 billion respectively.”
The legislation would also require at least a 30% IRS audit rate on households affected by the new wealth tax.
This plan is so very soft on the billionaires and yet we are going to see it being resisted violently and with extreme prejudice.
Even most of the extremely rich aren’t effected by this, if you calculate it out you need over 31,000,000 dollars before the lowest bracket kicks in.
Keep in mind it’s a wealth tax, not an income tax, so these numbers hit way harder than the income tax ones you’re used to.
Income taxes only effect money earned that year, and have plenty of loopholes to lower that amount significantly. A wealth tax is based on total wealth owned, so it hits every year at the full amount, assuming wealth never goes down. Think property taxes; you pay the same amount for your house tax every year, because you still own it. And if the value increases, so do the taxes.
For everyone saying this is not harsh enough, it is a WEALTH tax. Not income, wealth. All owned assets. Meaning any of these people who don’t increase their net worth by at least the amount of the tax each year will lose more and more of their total wealth year over year.
It isn’t intended to strip all mega rich people of all their stuff immediately - that obviously could never pass - but still is intended to open the door to wealth taxes and redistributive policies more broadly.
It’s a great move. If we can get anything like this passed, it is a significant victory.
Just getting something like this out of committee and on the floor for debate would be huge. Unfortunately it stands no chance with the current congress
In other news, renting a house has never been more popular! On secondary news, rent has raised across america by 8% unilaterally
I think it is more the state of American media. Similarly to before 08 housing crash, many home builders got stuck with over valued houses no one would buy. So they rented them out so that it would generate income and not have to take a write down. If you watch CNBC it tells you how the housing market is somehow doing amazing if you look at perfectly curated numbers that do not add up. One of the common media pieces at the moment is how popular this new rental home trend is and how its so helpful and gracious to those who can’t afford homes. Example: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/14/homes/build-for-rent-homes/index.html
I really love the floating design of the tax pegged to household income, but I’d probably oppose it due to exactly what you say: it opens the door to wealth taxes, which are by and large a bad idea.
We’ve proven time and time again that congress can’t properly tax the wealthy, and will always eventually default to squeezing revenue out of the middle class. 50 million as a minimum sounds nice and high until they add a bracket at 25 million, then 10, then before you know it there’s a non-inflation adjusted tax at 1 million or 500k. All that serves to do is hurt savers and the elderly (who will naturally have higher nest eggs being closer to retirement). This will 100% eventually come to pass, because taxing wealth is a further nudge towards a consumption (and therefore growth) based economy that publicly traded companies need to continue extracting wealth from consumers, so it will be lobbied for by all monied interests, both the rich and industry.
There are tons of other issues with a wealth tax like creating a new bureaucracy to measure wealth (not impossible, as some people say, just expensive), the fact that people are taxed for gains they may not have realized or just for leaving money in the bank or stock market, something that is actually good for the economy, and other complaints. It’s also just inferior to a better income tax, and expanding income taxes to eliminate the loopholes the megarich use, chief among them borrowing against collateralized debt. If someone gets a loan but puts up stock or properties as collateral, that loan should count as income. There are tons of other loopholes, and the fact that we’re ignoring low-hanging fruit and talking about wealth taxes shows me this is about scoring political points, not actually trying to reform how our government gets money.
It’s got a snowballs chance in hell of going anywhere, but it’s nigh time a wealth tax entered the realm of possibility
Yeah, we have a better chance of pigs flying, getting struck by lightning, and winning the lottery all at the same time on the same day simultaneously than this has of actually passing both chambers and getting signed into an actual law. This type of thing will never pass when the very oligarchs it seeks to tax own the very government responsible for making it a law.
Eight whole percent. I can hear their boots shaking now /s
Go with the Bernie plan. Anything over $1B is taxed at 100%. Shit, I think even that is too soft. Nobody needs even a fraction of that to for themselves and their children’s children’s children’s … to live like kings their entire lives.
Also, it’s always hilarious how American politicians are so obsessed with overly on-the-nose acronyms for legislation.
What a travesty. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of the brows of everyone he’s screwed over to amass his fortune? Sure, I might not have two cents to rub together between paychecks but I’d better oppose this just in case I get rich some day.
